his books (and himself) and advising and invest-ing in tech start-ups, an existence that earnshim, he says, “comfortably many millions ayear—more than three and less than 100.”The story of how Ferriss got to thispoint is something of a legend by now.After running BrainQuicken for a cou-ple of years, he was bringing home about$40,000 a month and working nonstopseven days a week. He realized it was makinghim miserable and resolved to remove himselffrom day-to-day operations as much as possible,automating or outsourcing everything. He startedwith a plan to spend four weeks in Europe to clear his headand wound up traveling the world for 15 months. His businesscontinued to thrive without him. When he returned, he keptthe company on autopilot and started the process of writingabout how he had managed to take back his life. Twenty-sevenpublishers passed on the book before one finally made a smallbet on it and printed a paltry 12,000 copies. Then Ferriss theself-promoter got to work, and the book took off.

But if the autopilot version of running BrainQuicken
afforded Ferriss a life of leisure—or at least a lifestyle he
could tout as leisure while he was busy working on his next
act—the business of being Tim Ferriss, Self-Help Guru, is
not quite as accommodating. In The 4-Hour Workweek,
Ferriss advises taking regular “mini retirements,” ideally a month
off for every two months of work. But he hasn’t had a proper
mini retirement in more than a year now.

Hence the Bali trip, which is an attempt to apply that core
principle to his new life and keep from looking like someone
who doesn’t live by his own advice. Over four weeks, he’s
planning to become fluent in Indonesian, learn to play
gamelan music, exercise or do yoga at least one hour per day,
and immerse himself in the life of the family compound. He
didn’t bring a laptop and swears he won’t touch his phone or
email or calendar. He has a personal assistant in California
handling his day-to-day affairs, and he alerted the founders
of the companies he advises that he would be unreachable.
“This is the first real complete power reset in the past year,”
he says. “You can’t just set up systems and not test them. So
this is a stress test.”

t’s not hard to understand why Ferriss’s messagehas achieved mainstream success. It promisesan easy path to big rewards—in Ferriss’s case,quality of life as defined by Corona ads,with or without the attendant riches.

What’s less obvious is why The 4-HourWorkweek became a runaway success inthe technology start-up world and hasgiven Ferriss vast credibility in Silicon Valley.On the surface, there’s a disconnect betweenmost ambitious entrepreneurs and the audienceFerriss seems to target in The 4-Hour Workweek.

The book is about, and for, people who dislike what
their work has done to their lives. A lot of tech entrepreneurs,
on the other hand, want nothing more than to work.

But there are also similarities between Ferriss’s approachto lifestyle and the hacker mindset of Silicon Valley. Both arelooking for the shortest path to a desired outcome, and bothtake it as an inherent good to exploit an existing rule to yourbenefit, or, better yet, to write an entirely new set of rules.“The 4-Hour Workweek was really about hacking your time,”says Mike Maples, founder of the venture capital firm Flood-gate and an occasional co-investor with Ferriss. “The bookcould have just been called Time Hacks. 4-Hour Body couldhave been called Body Hacks. To some degree, even thoughthose weren’t the titles, the idea immediately resonated withthat hacker mentality.”One of the key ways Ferriss tries to disrupt how peoplethink about productivity is by urging them not to think interms of time management. “I think time management as alabel encourages people to view each 24-hour period as a slotin which they should pack as much as possible,” Ferriss says.For maximum productivity, in his view, people should focuson doing less, not more. The point is to maximize the out-come, not the amount of work. (See “Stop Doing That” onpage 76.)

One of Ferriss’s more heretical pieces of advice is based onwhat he calls the 80/20 rule. Eighty percent of your productivitycomes from 20 percent of your efforts, and likewise, 80 percentof your wasted time comes from 20 percent of the possiblecauses. So eliminate the 20-percent time wasters, and spend asmuch energy as possible on the productive 20 percent. Ferriss’sfavorite example of acting on this phenomenoncomes from his BrainQuicken days, when he real-ized two customers were the source of nearly all ofhis work stress, and the effect was carrying overinto his personal life. He read those customers theriot act. One reformed. The other Ferriss fired.Immediately, he had more time for his healthierbusiness relationships, and his bottom line grew.

“That passage just leapt off the page for me,”
says Tobi Lütke, the CEO of the e-commerce
platform Shopify, another company Ferriss

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